Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  “Maybe it belonged to Agnes,” I tell her. “Please, can’t I have it? I need something for these!” I wiggle my fingers at her. I feel a twinge of betrayal at blaming Agnes, but then I think how much she’d have wanted to help us escape. I think of her blood-red, chipped, sexy nails. Without the file, what will I use to screw and unscrew the heating vent plate? I try not to think about this until Orielee’s left the room, and once she does, I look at Spider Nun, miming dismay. She looks back at me, her mouth a delicate bow. She holds out her hand, fingers splayed as though to show off a brand-new manicure. She’s let the nails of both of her pointer fingers grow long, saving them somehow even during the weaving, or maybe using them to knot or cut bits of yarn. I am skeptical, but later that night, when all is quiet, she adeptly uses her finger to screw and then unscrew the vent plate.

  I laugh. “What I wouldn’t give to have your nails!”

  She just smiles again. Sera didn’t come at dinner, either, and I’m just hoping she’s on in the morning and can make it to our room. We work all night, me and my friend Spider Nun. I like watching her, like just being around her. I wonder if I will ever know her name.

  October 17

  Morning, and Sera still doesn’t come. I am worried that the routine here is disorienting me, even though I’ve become adept at getting rid of my vitamins. We have only eight feet left to do on the rope. But I’m so terrified that we will be discovered and our rope confiscated that I decide this must be the last night we work. I now convince myself that a slight drop at the end is less hazardous than losing our chance to escape altogether. And Spider Nun is looking so terribly worn out, so weak and so skinny, that I am afraid if we wait much longer she won’t have the strength to lower herself down the side of the building. Before noon, the Slider comes in and jabs us, takes our blood, pee, more nail clippings, swabs from our mouths and noses. She weighs us and listens to our babies, jotting long notes into her computer. The Slider hardly speaks to us while she is performing these tasks, but I’m happy because I’m hoping that if she is on today and Geri is on tonight, then Jessie will be on tomorrow after midnight. The nineteenth. The date in Eddy’s letter.

  Noon. Sera brings our lunch trays. Two of them. One tray contains our food. The other tray is covered. She says, “Hide all of this and look at it later.” She gives me a piece of paper, which I slip into my bra. Then she swiftly kisses me, holding my face a moment in her cool, winter-mom hands. As she leaves, I feel her fade from me. Under the green towel on one of the trays, there is a hammer, a sort of folding cane, and a tiny old-fashioned tape recorder with an actual tape in it. So Sera and Glen, to go vintage. There are also four Power Bars. What these things have to do with our escape, I can’t tell. But Spider Nun quickly unscrews the heat vent, I put them in, and we divide the food onto two trays. We eat every bite—a mushy spaghetti with indeterminate meat in the sauce. Powdered milk. Congealed cornstarch pudding, butterscotch or maybe just scorched. After our check, I go into the bathroom and read the note from Sera. You can eat this, says the last line, it’s sweet rice paper and the ink is nontoxic! I want to laugh, but I do eat the escape instructions, and they’re pretty tasty.

  Spider Nun and I sleep away the afternoon. I wake once and look over at her face, so pure in repose. Her forehead is like a river stone, moon warm, shining with light. I am so anxious that I cannot sleep and so I watch the sky deepen. The sun goes down, fiercely, casting radiance from the west into the eastern sky, where it edges the clouds with a blaze of gold lace.

  Dear baby, I want you to see this world, supernal, lovely. I want this world to fill your eyes.

  We take turns, one sitting by the door and listening to the noise in the hallway, the other weaving the rope. The one by the door stands up when someone’s coming, and the weaver hides the rope. If it looks as though someone might come in the door, the lookout jumps into bed and the weaver pretends to sleep, too. This happens about a dozen times tonight and helps to keep us awake. The night is long, though, and writing this also helps me to stay alert. Also, if I’m falling asleep I panic trying to think of what we will do once we are really out of here.

  I have a pretty good idea what would happen to us if we stayed. They would take you. They would study you. And as for me, I would first have to survive your delivery, and plenty of women do not. They die during anesthesia, I think, especially if, like Agnes Starr, they make trouble. But even if I did survive your delivery, I might not be set free. There are rumors. Early on, we heard about Womb Volunteers, but maybe there were not enough of them and so there is talk of a female draft now. I’ve overheard snippets of conversation. Women are being forced to try and carry to term a frozen embryo from the old in-vitro clinics. That or be inseminated with sperm from the old sperm banks. I don’t know whether to believe these things, but here I am.

  Thinking.

  Evolution starts: a miracle. Evolution stops: a miracle. Life follows the pattern of the vastness all around us. The universe is expanding and contracting in timeless time. The earth 4.5 billion years old, the sun due to supernova and swallow us. And then contract again. Well, that’s what I think, and I am obviously only a lay observer of the great mystery, the simple why, which no scientist can answer any better than me.

  We get our rope to what seems long enough, almost. We fork the end so there are two long, tough ribbons of rope to fasten to the leg of the bed. Then we practice the knot, over and over, with variations, until we can do it with our eyes closed and are sure it won’t slip.

  October 19

  Our last day in the hospital. In the morning, we sleep as long as we can, preparing for the night. Later, Spider Nun rips four or five long, thick strips from a stolen hospital gown. She is going to use the gown to make a bundle, the contents of her suitcase. I will use my backpack for my own few things—the books, your blankets and newborn clothes. My jeans and Phil’s shirt I’ll wear underneath the robe. I’ll wear the jacket I brought, but carry the shoes in the pack. My sticky green elf booties will be perfect for walking down the wall. We manage to choke down our lunch. Everything goes well, no hitches. We even take a nap. Yes, everything goes perfectly until the nurses are about to change shifts. Then Orielee comes in.

  Even though I tell her that the Slider did all of this today, she writes down everything, our vitals, the works. She extracts blood, does cheek swabs, cuts our hair again and tucks the strands into little envelopes. She tidies everything up on the tray and she is about to leave when she glances down at the heating vent, focuses, and frowns at it thoughtfully.

  “Orielee, can I ask you something?” I want to distract her, but she refuses to hear me.

  “Hey!”

  She stares still more intently at the heating vent, then gets up, walks over, and creakingly kneels down to peer inside. Spider Nun and I get out of bed. Orielee pants to her feet and turns to us. Just the fact that we are standing there, stupidly panicked, confirms everything. Her face is neutral, she isn’t letting on what she will do, but as Orielee walks away from us to the door she gives that mirthless little gurgle, her laugh. As soon as she does, Spider Nun springs behind her and lightly swings that strap of cloth torn from her hospital gown over Orielee’s head. She jerks it tight, from behind, so quickly that Orielee’s feet go out from under her and she is down, sitting on the floor, her center of gravity tipping her back as Spider Nun twists the material. Tighter. Tighter. Orielee’s face flushes to a deep red. She throws up her hands, flailing them around to grab Spider Nun, who is on her knees behind Orielee, still twisting.

  “Fucksake! Little help?” says my roommate through gritted teeth. She flashes her eyes at me. Her thin arms are straining to contain the big woman’s energetic bucking.

  That’s when I do the thing that will send me to hell. I jump down off the bed and grab Orielee’s hands and twist them behind her, fast in my grip. She rolls over, kicking and drumming her feet. I throw myself over her, sideways, to hold her down. Spider Nun keeps twisting with both fists, more, tighter,
until Orielee’s eyes and tongue pop out and her face goes purple. Our faces are almost as rigid and horrible as hers. I’m on top, now, so I see her eyes. The wild, penetrating look, her irises pinpointing me, blood seeping into the corners of her lids and bloody tears running down alongside her nose. At last her legs relax and splay open and she is dead.

  Spider Nun falls over gasping and gagging for air. I shake a pillow out of its case and pull the case down over Orielee’s head, so there is just her body to contend with. That’s bad enough. I am riveted by Orielee’s Garfield-print scrubs jacket with cartoon panels of Garfield looking at a volcano, Garfield in a jungle, Garfield bored, with a book in his paws, Garfield critical of a houseplant.

  The only thing for me to do is treat the fact that Spider Nun spoke as normal, along with the fact that we have killed Orielee. Normal.

  “Let’s try and fit her into the closet,” says Spider Nun.

  We take all of our things out of the closet, then we try to hoist Orielee in through the double door. We prop her up inside and tie her onto the clothes hooks using another strip of hospital gown. We latch the door tightly. Orielee hadn’t picked up the tray of our samples and put it back on the cart yet. So we do that. We put the cart in the hall outside of the room. We’re both dizzy, so we stagger back to our beds and throw ourselves under the blankets. Half an hour passes. We are numb, buzzing. There is a sick thump, a straining creak, as Orielee’s body settles inside the closet. We hear a nurse come by and say, “Oh, here’s her tray. She must have checked out early. It’s her birthday.” We hear them wheel away the cart. There is silence.

  Spider Nun and I turn slowly to look at each other.

  “So what’s your name?” I ask her. “I’m tired of calling you Spider Nun.”

  “You called me that?” She doesn’t smile, but her voice goes from dazed to amused. “My name’s Tia Jackson.”

  “Tia? Jackson?”

  “My family has been here for six generations,” she says with hardened indignation, “probably longer than . . . oh, forget it. Ha. I forgot you’re an Indian.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you feel awful?” she says after a while.

  “Not yet. I’m probably still in shock or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come you never spoke?”

  “First law of capture. Never let them know you know their language.”

  That seems like very good thinking, and I ask if Tia’s learned anything.

  “Well, besides the land bridge theory, which oh my god you went on about forever? I do hear stuff. They don’t kill them, anyway.” She touches her stomach, gently. “The ones born alive so far are more physically adept. They grab things earlier, walk sooner. They are bigger. Nobody knows about speech. Not that many have, you know, spoken so far.”

  “I assumed that they studied them,” I said.

  “Let’s not go there,” says Tia.

  “Did they really kill all of the prisoners?”

  “It depended on what they were charged with. Some of them were trained as bounty hunters and sent to find us. One of them found me. Was that your mom who gave us lunch?”

  “Yes. Why didn’t you at least talk to me?”

  “You could have inadvertently given me away.”

  “So are you ready?”

  “I am so very ready,” says Tia Jackson. “And you, are you going to tell me what was on that piece of paper you ate?”

  I tell her. After a while they bring dinner and we try to choke down everything. They take away the dinner trays. Again we are alone in the room, in the silence. I can’t help looking at the closet, and neither can Tia.

  “It was her birthday,” she says.

  We spend some time sitting very still, trying not to throw up the food we’ve eaten, food we need to sustain us during our escape.

  “We shouldn’t talk about her,” I say at last. “We should talk about other things. What were you before?”

  “Designer,” says Tia. “Textile patterns. I get ideas all of the time. I work fast.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes, but I took my ring off, threw it under a bush. I know exactly where. I’m going back for it. I didn’t want them to have anything.”

  “Where did they catch you?”

  “Outside my studio.”

  “Does your husband know where you are?”

  “I don’t know,” says Tia. She shakes her head and turns away from me, more emotional than I’ve ever seen her. “I just don’t know.” Her voice is thin.

  “If you go home, it’s the first place they’ll look.”

  She just nods, resting her forehead on her clasped hands, on her knees.

  “It’s hard now that I can talk to you,” she says. “Before, it wasn’t so real.”

  “Pretend like it still isn’t real,” I say.

  But the hours drag on, so slow. I read out loud to her from Is That in the Bible? Where did Hebrews wear kilts? What man wore a hat trimmed with blue lace? Who gave soup to an angel? Who went fishing naked? Who ate a mouse behind a tree? Who thought his conscience was in his kidneys? There is a Bible verse to answer each question. First Chronicles 19:4. Hanun does this to David’s servants. Exodus 28:37–38. Aaron wears one. Gideon, Judges 6:19. Peter, John 20:7. Sacred mice are mentioned several places in the Bible. The Psalmist: “Thus my heart was grieved and I was pricked in my reins” (kidneys).

  We become hysterical, breathless with fear of what we are about to do and what we have done. We eat one Power Bar each, holding each little pinch on our tongues—a taste out of the world of before. Then at last we hear it, the scream from the other end of the hall, the patter and slam of panic, running, the diversion that our friend has devised to shield the sound of breaking glass.

  We shut the door, set the odd, canelike gadget under the door handle. I start the little tape recorder with the volume turned all the way up. There will be eight minutes of silence and then voices will start responding to anybody trying to open the door, so that nobody thinks we’re gone yet. Tia gets our clothes and packs and I take the hammer out from under my pillow and begin to smash the window. It doesn’t break into jagged pieces, but with about the sixth blow it turns into a web of glass pebbles and just comes apart, tumbling out of the frame and down the side of the building. There’s a wild rush of air. The lights on the towers glitter in the clear night. The two of us tie the rope to the leg of Tia’s bed, pushed tight against the wall, and we throw the rope out the window. It slithers down, nearly touching the roof of the floor below, I think. It’s long enough.

  The air rushing in is excitingly cool, delicious. We are used to the stable indoor air of the hospital. We’ve got the clothes we came in underneath our hospital gowns—my jeans slide dangerously down my hips, completely unzipped now. I need suspenders. Tia’s got her possessions bound onto her back—the tiny layette, her few extra clothes. Letting her go first is the only thing to do. She’s much lighter. If I break the rope somehow or the knot won’t hold, that’s two of us who won’t escape. There is no moonlight, and except for the lights on top of the radio towers, just a few places illuminated below us. The city is dark now, mostly, and the bridge across the river ghostly black. The Mississippi glistens like an oiled muscle. Tia says, “Here I go.” She carries her baby gracefully, a compact slope of belly, and as she climbs up and balances on the sill she looks nimble as a dancer, and eager.

  “Wait!” I say. “All the glass!”

  I put a pillow under the place where the rope will pull taut going over the edge, so it won’t fray. Smiling at me, Tia sets her legs on either side of the rope and then edges out and over the ledge of the window. I secure my pack, kneel on the sill and radiator, looking over. I watch her teeter down the wall, carefully, but quickly as she can, too. When she’s about halfway down there is a knock on the door. Then a crunch as someone tries to open it. I tap the rope to let her know, and she scrambles down more quickly. I hear a thunk and the rope bounces up—I am afraid sh
e fell hard at the end. I am over the edge quick as I can get there, braced at the side of the brick building. As I take the first steps down, I hear pounding and the tape recorder switches on. Sera’s voice, very loud, on the edge of panic. “Wait a sec, something’s jammed! Okay, I’m trying, too.” And so on. The stick against the door is one of those instant security locks that you can take to a cheap motel. Intruder safe. I can only hope that it will hold.

  The Power Bar and the adrenaline make it easy for me, at first, and I glide down scarcely thinking of the height, which is good. About halfway down, I get dizzy and have to pause, cling to the rope, and brace myself against the wall. I look down inadvertently, or not exactly down, but over my shoulder across the river, which is worse. Because I’m just a big-bellied spider on a string and my arms are shaking. The sky’s so big, so dark, and there is nothing between me and the roof below, except this braided rope. I think of Grandma Virginia, her dry little claws, still braiding, and the scratchy breathless fever of her laugh. “I’ll help you!” she says, and at the thought of her, so frail and endless, I keep going. Tia’s at the bottom, holding her belly, breathing hard, silent, waiting, and when I touch down I am suddenly so drained with relief that I don’t think I can move.

  “C’mon!” Tia’s frantic, tugging my arm. “Your mom’s blocked the door open. I can see the light. Get your ass up, quick.”

  And so we creep along the wall until we get to the door that Sera’s kept open with nothing more than a salad fork. We melt inside and start running down the stairwell. Then all of a sudden, Sera’s charging up the stairs—there’s something wrong. We’re supposed to meet her at the bottom. She grabs us. “Move, move.” And we hurtle down the last of the stairs and out to where a recycling truck idles alongside six huge green Dumpsters. We vault into the passenger’s side door as the truck pulls out of the service lot. We’re on the wonderful slimy floor of the cab, which smells more of feet and burnt rubber than garbage. Mom grabs us and helps us into a well behind the seat, full of clothes and tools. We feel the truck moving. The motor rumbles powerfully under and all around us. I am holding on to you, and on to Sera’s shoulders, just trying to get my breath back. She strokes my hair, tells me to put on the padded coveralls, the reflective-signal-taped jacket, the helmet. Tia, curled in the seat between Sera and the driver, is rolling into the huge clothes. The helmet balances on her head, her neck a frail stalk. She grins at me.